Sun Microsystems used to be the darling stock during the dot-com boom. The company was the “dot” that connects everybody in the internet, so goes the saying. And IBM used to make jokes about this marketing statement – Sun was just a little dot, so why bother? But IBM can afford to be arrogant because their bread and butter were not on their AIX (IBM’s version of UNIX) but rather their mainframes. In fact IBM Corp. can prosper without its UNIX division, the same way Hewlett-Packard Co. can do without its HP-UX division. HP’s bread and butter were in printer business. But it won’t be fun to let Sun Microsystems monopolize the UNIX market and so the three UNIX players – SUN’s Solaris, IBM’s AIX and HP’s HP-UX.
Sun Microsystems engineers used to be proud owners of their share options and most of them didn’t exercise during the technology bull and they were watching in disbelieve how their stocks value tumbled. After the dot-com crash Sun Microsystems tried numerous ways to find their killer-apps to rise above the horizon again but never succeed. However unlike other IT giants that perished after a tsunami, Sun did one thing right – it continues to expand its R&D. Even after the technology crash it still command loyalty amongst its customers in corporate data centers. It’s strength in software, system design and research enable it to survive until today.
Sun’s most innovative and daring creation was perhaps Java, and internet programming language that is the de-facto computer science’s teaching language in most of the learning institutions. Programs written in Java are widely used in data centers and gadgets such as cell-phones. Both IBM and Sun Microsystems support open-source operating system Linux. Sun even bought MySQL, open-source database used in web commerce, for $1 billion in 2008. Despite its leading engineering in software the profitability was not promising and hence talks of Sun becoming the target of acquisition by other technology companies, amongst them Cisco and even EMC. Too bad it’s free StarOffice which was design to rival Microsoft Corp’s Microsoft Office didn’t take off. Sun’s dependence on its Solaris operating system is history although the respect for Solaris remains.
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March 19th, 2009 by financetwitter
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